Sunday, April 26, 2009

Photographing your set up


If you have to take down your set-up due to this
or that reason, photograph it from exactly the
same position from which you are painting it.
AND photograph it from above as well. How things
look when only viewed from the front can be
deceiving.
This is the set-up of one of my students. It is
quite the interesting challenge to do a painting
when everything in it is in the same color family.
Well except for the orange marble!

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

More on Tube Tops

This is not my original idea, but it sure is a great
one. I got it from an art magazine years ago and
only wish I could acknowledge the clever artist
who shared it.
These are called 'eye hooks'. They are a great
solution for caps that have disappeared. But better
still, they are a great solution for the way the necks
of paint tubes get all loaded with paint and it is
impossible to screw on the caps because the screw
threads are full of dried paint.
You will notice that there are different sized screws.
Different brands of paint have different sized holes.
So experiment by buying several sizes. Even if the
size you have doesn't fill the hole completely, it will
keep a channel open for you to get the paint out
easily.
I have found that I almost never bought a size big
enough when I started doing this years ago.
The artist who wrote about this did this with all
his paint tubes and then hung them from something
he made so he could easily find his paints. I never
did that. Just doing this was a great help.

Sunday, April 5, 2009

Paint tube tops


After an artist has been using tube paints for a while,

the caps can become more difficult to get off. This is

true for all paint mediums that come in tubes, even

watercolor. The two tried and true methods of getting

off stuck caps are plyers and then using a lit match

to soften the hardened paint around the edges of the

cap.

There is still another way to handle this, but that is a

post for another day!